The technological revolution of the late 20th and early 21st century has put a premium on competitive corporate intelligence. Companies, especially those involved in high tech, seek to determine what their competitors are putting in their latest products. To this end, integrated circuits, especially high value, cutting edge, microchips are constantly being reverse engineered, analyzed, and dissected to determine what are their internal structures and interconnections.
Currently, the dissection and analysis of integrated circuits involves a painstaking, laborious process. Each layer in a multi-layer microchip is carefully exposed and imaged/photographed. A mosaic of the images is then created and the traces are then laboriously traced to determine which feature is interconnected with which component. As can be imagined, this resource-intensive process can lead to mistakes as features and areas which may not be of interest may need to be imaged and analyzed, simply to ensure that the features of interest are covered.
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